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Who are the real leaders in IoT?

April 11, 201618:06Stuart Corner

Market research firm IoT Analytics produces a quarterly report ranking the top 20 IoT companies. Given how difficult it is to (a) define the IoT market and (b) corral a company’s IoT revenue/activities, that’s a pretty tall order. Nevertheless, it makes for interesting reading, and the company is unequivocal as to who the leaders of IoT are.

IoT Analytics is helped to some extent by the companies that declare their IoT related revenue. On this basis GE is the leader by a country mile: it is forecasting IoT related sales of $US5b for FY15. Intel is in number two position at $US2.28b and Fitbit number three with $US1.8b.

GE’s IoT revenues are all related to its Predix platform and IoT Analytics makes the point that the company’s reported “astronomical” growth in IoT revenues from $0 in 2012 is almost certainly heavily dependent on a reclassification of existing revenues. The same cannot be said of Fitbit, which is a 100 percent IoT company and is “growing at an incredible pace of 142 percent per annum.”

These standouts aside, the report puts something of a damper on the febrile statements made in some quarters about the growth of IoT. “The analysis of self-reported revenues shows one important insight: IoT is not growing as fast as many analyst firms want us to believe. If you take out GE, Fitbit, and PTC (which is growing from a very low basis), then the growth rates of the companies mentioned are in the 10 percent to 35 percent range, averaging around the low 20s. IoT is a strongly growing trend but we are not in the 40 percent or 50 percent range (or even higher) as some IoT reports suggest.”

For what it is worth, IoT Analytics compiles an overall top 20 ranking of IoT companies based on a combination of monthly searched on Google in conjunction with IoT, newspaper and blog mentions in conjunction with IoT and the number of employees on LinkedIN that carry the flag “Internet of Things”. On that basis, the top five are Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Cisco (Cisco may be unfairly disadvantaged as a result of its penchant for using the term “Internet of Everything” and its corresponding acronym).

Interesting through these rankings are it’s questionable how useful they are in isolation because they are not really comparing apples with apples. However repeated at regular intervals, which they are they do show important trends. And most notable in this report is the rise of Asian IoT players. Specifically: “Korean electronics company LG gained 12 spots and is now ranked number 11.”

However, overall IoT Analytics says the picture is clear. “There are four real leaders of IoT emerging: Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco. These companies not only promote IoT strongly, they also have a strong workforce behind their IoT efforts. (IBM being the biggest).”